Roden
Issue 113
May 2, 2026

New Japan, NYC, Soderbergh Bonanza, Too Much Movement

The year is racing by, just trying to hold on

Roden Readers —

Hello from Crazy Weather Town. Is it spring? Some days it feels like it might be, for a few milliseconds. And then other days, no. No spring for you. The floor heating was on this morning and that felt good. Soon enough the sauna will be on over the entirety of the country. Tonight, 100 kilometer per hour winds. Also, Monday morning, more 100 km/hr winds combined with rain.

I’m Craig Mod and this is Roden, and how is it already May??

#Recent Magazine Work and “The New Japan”

I have a new essay about the Inland Sea out in The New Japan, the magazine edited by W. David Marx and published by NOT A HOTEL. It’s beautifully produced, really. Well worth nabbing the issue in print. Grateful to have been asked to contribute.

I also have an extensive interview with ceramicist Kazunori Hamana in the forthcoming Apartamento magazine issue coming out on May 6. Hamana was an absolute pleasure to chat with. If I hadn’t pulled the plug after four hours, I fear we may still be chatting. An interesting human doing interesting work and living interestingly. Grateful to have been asked to interview him.

#NYC

True to my promise I made to myself at the end of my TBOT book tour (note: TBOT Random House hardcover is on sale for $16.90 (sadly only on Amazon)) last year, I’m going to NYC and going to be there for about two months. It already feels too short, and I haven’t yet left. I arrive next week. I’m looking to go to as many book events as possible. I want to be ensconced in readings and talks and performances. Do you know of any good ones? Please let me know! I thought I might do a couple events myself, but then caught myself: What if I just … went? And just … was there? And just … enjoyed it? Which is a thing I’ve never really done before. (As usual, I’ll be working on edits and newsletters and other stuff in the background but you know what I mean …)

Related: There’s a David Sedaris reading at The Strand on May 30, but it’s all sold out — anyone have an extra ticket or know how to sneak a guy in?

I’m mainly looking to go down my list of a million people I want to have coffees and dinners with, and luxuriate in the multicultural chaos energy that is NY / Brooklyn. Sitting in Fort Greene Park with a book will, I hope, be the shape of many a morning.

Somewhere in there, I’d like to do a five-day NYC mega-walk pop-up. I’ll have to strategize placement. Hmm!

#Seen, Read, Consumed

I’ve been reading a bunch of books and articles, and watching a bunch of film these past few months. And I want to make note of a few.

But first! Are you aware of Steven Soderbergh’s annual list of things watched / read? They’re fascinating for a couple of reasons aside from his fastidious record keeping. 1) You could shadow a year of media in the shape of Soderbergh, and 2) Holy crap the guy consumes a lot while also being a prolific director. Here’s his 2024 and 2025 lists. I couldn’t help myself — I took 16 years of his lists and through some — ahem — Claude assistance, extracted his 20 most watched films. (The best question to ask people isn’t “What’s your favorite movie?” but “Which movie have you watched the most?”)

Here they are in a table:

Fascinatingly, eight (!!) of the top-20 watched are movies he directed or produced: Haywire, Side Effects, Logan Lucky, Behind the Candelabra, Contagion, Magic Mike, Ocean’s Eight, and Bitter Pill/Side Effects. Two Fincher films: Panic Room and The Social Network.

But Jaws stands out. About Jaws (24 viewings!) he’s said: “Every time I look at it, it gets better and is even more of an achievement than when it came out.”

Since Soderbergh edits all his own films (under the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard (his mother’s maiden name)), you could presume that a lot of those watches/rewatches were while working on cuts. In fact, the data supports this hypothesis: the view count drops to zero after release dates for his films.

So here is the list without his films / editorial views included:

Sixteen of twenty films are from 1968–1981 — the “New Hollywood” window.

I have … actually not seen many of his top-20 watched films! They’re all going on my to-watch list. Perhaps most mortifying, I have never seen Jaws (1975)! It’s one of those films that falls into the weird zone for me, timing-wise. I was born after it was released, but not so long after that it ever felt like a “classic” that must be watched. Going to rectify that tonight.

Update: Rectified. Wow. OK. That was so much better than I expected. I had this image of a cheap ’70s thriller / horror throwaway with bad effects and overplayed music. But it’s actually a perfectly crafted jewlbox of a film. Incredible performances by Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss (so young!). A drum-tight script by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb. Not a wasted scene / moment. And Spielberg, OK, yeah he was always a genius (in collab here with DP Bill Butler). The blocking, the complexity of the shots without them feeling complex — so much background / foreground action happening. Some wildly ambitious one-shots (the scene of getting on the car ferry, for example). It feels like such a rich, fully formed world. Also, the dialog was amazing — a lot of talking over one another, background jibber jabber, and more. The fact that they let Robert Shaw’s character speak like he spoke — almost unintelligibly at points — was also incredible. Lots of New England Big Fisherman Energy going on. An absolute joy, through and through. Beautiful lighting, beautiful color. And amazing effects. I now understand why this was so impactful in 1975. I will be watching it again, and I can see why Soderbergh has watched it so much (he’s also writing a book on it, so there’s that, too).

Now, I don’t like to shit on films (because even the bad ones took so much work; it’s a miracle any of them succeed, honestly), but I couldn’t help but think of how Jaws felt in contrast to Jonah Hill’s new movie Outcome (2026) with Keanu Reeves. There are many, many, many criticisms you can throw at this film, and I absolutely don’t recommend watching it, but if you do (or have), pay attention to / think back on the utter lack of people in the film’s world. Almost no extras, no background movement. Every scene compressed into a single plane. It’s visually incredibly boring (and weirdly saturated).

Jaws feels like what a “film” in the absolute sense of the word should be like. Outcome feels like a half-hearted simulation of the same thing. Jaws is a world unto itself. Outcome is a few indoor sets. (When watching Outcome, the scene where Keanu actually walks the streets of LA going to that doll shop — I felt myself take a deep breath, like the film had finally found a door into the rest of the world; I don’t think this was a deliberate choice.)

On my list of rewatches, No Country for Old Men (2007) would be up there. I realized a couple months ago I had never read the original Cormac McCarthy novel (amzn | bkshp). So I did. It’s fantastic. This pair of No Country for Old Men film + book might be one of the tightest adaptations I can think of. Well worth reading and watching in tandem. The book reads like a script. And the movie watches like a novel. Tommy Lee Jones’ monologues always felt novelistic and, indeed, they’re pulled right from the text.

The book is obviously longer than the film, in that it contains more scenes and dialog. I have to say, the movie might actually be the better manifestation of the story. One scene in particular, Chigurh and the coin flip. In the film it’s quite punchy, to the point. An incredible scene. One of the best scenes in film of the last twenty years? Definitely up there. In the book, Chigurh continues on a much longer monologue:

Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?

Maybe it’s because I had watched the movie so many times, but this addition in the book felt superfluous. It felt wholly unnecessary.

Whereas in the film Chigurh says, “Don’t put that in your pocket, it’s your lucky quarter.” And the guys says, “Well where do you want me to put it?” And Chigurh says “Well anywhere but not in your pocket where it’ll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin … which it is.”

Which to me feels like an ideal summation of the above ‘graph. And Javier Bardem delivers it all perfectly, strangely, dementedly.

Meanwhile, I could never imagine a film version of The Wizard of Earthsea living up to the experience of the book. Whereas Project Hail Mary read like a movie, and the movie, indeed, watched like the book. The fun bit of bouncing back and forth between book / film with Project Hail Mary is seeing how much science they were able to keep in the movie, and how much they had to compress, and how they compressed it. (A few key book scenes were omitted; it might have been fun to imagine it as a two part, maximalist film version of the book.) Train Dreams (2025) the movie does not contain the magic of the book, IMO. And I kind of wish I hadn’t seen the film, since now it’ll be in the back of my mind (has sort of overwritten my internal movie) next time I read it.

I should probably go read Jaws now.

#Working on a New Thing, Protecting Creative Time

I’ve been working on a new book-shaped thing this past month. And have been publishing a daily members-only diary (~10,000 words so far of diary) about the meta process. (Not talking about the book itself.) It’s been good. I’m 34,000 words or so into this new project. The other day I got sidelined by “Adulting” style to-dos and wrote the following, which feels worth sharing here:

#Too much Movement

I think a lot (too much) about a breakfast scene in Phantom Thread. The one where Daniel Day-Lewis’ character (the fabulously named Reynolds Woodcock), dress-maker extraordinaire (fully committed, utterly committed, consumed by dresses), is drawing, sketching, working on some design in silence while having breakfast with his new “muse” / lover, Alma. She butters the bread loudly. She pours her tea loudly. “Please, don’t move so much Alma,” he says. She looks at him like he’s nuts (he is a little nuts). “I’m buttering my toast. I’m not moving too much.” And he goes: “It’s hard to ignore, it’s as if you just rode a horse across the room.” He finally gets up and leaves. “Too much movement. Entirely too much movement at breakfast,” he says. Her movement has ruined the morning. 

I empathize with Reynolds probably more than I should. (While also feeling bad for Alma.) (Reynolds’ sister looks on in amusement; may we all rise to the level of sister.) On working days, when I’m trying to live entirely in Bookworld, that’s how I feel when I have to call, say, my bank. Too much movement. Entirely too much movement. Calling the bank. Listening to the touchpad menu options. Going through all the details with the bank person. Too much movement. 

It’s a kind of death for the creative part of the mind. The ability to enter into Bookworld is murdered by saying your account number out loud. I don’t know why that’s so, it just is. Maybe it has something to do with the confined particularities of accounts, of banking, of paying bills, for example. How these systems are now more and more complex. Intricate in ways that bring no pleasure or satisfaction of completion. Are never complete. Convenient, yes, in some ways but all necessitating that you: pick up the Mediation Device in order to engage. 

Touching the device is too much movement. The device is tricky like that. It looks inert, the black mirror. There on the counter. Very demure. It’s a Stone of Terrenon made modern. It will teach you the name of the shadow that haunts you while binding you twice over. To make the call you much touch the stone. To move your hand to the stone is not a few feet, it’s a few lifetimes. You touch the stone and lose a life, lose a path. You are rewired. It’s so much more movement than you could ever imagine. 

You have to change an airline ticket. So much movement. A billion kilometers of hellhounds burning with the ferocity of nuclear Armageddon sit between you and completing that task with the airline (so feels your creative mind). The airline is not your friend. The airline’s business model is one of too much movement. Distances are not ever what they seem. More, more, more. They extract from you senselessly. 

The thing from which you most protect your creative work — your deep work, your thoughtful work — is: movement. You must create a space free of unnecessary movement. You must be able to retreat to that space and line the walls with adamantine and not let anything in that spins lies to you about distance. All bureaucracy is a lie of the highest order. Each form is a thousand miles. Like this, too much movement enters the day and the day is lost to these seemingly small tasks “riding a horse through the room” of your work. You put off the tasks for days and days because you know how much secret movement they contain. And then finally, with a sigh, you go: Fine, fine let’s make this call. Two hours later you have been stretched forty-billion miles across the galaxy. All your reserves for deep work have been plundered. The bank, the airline, they have induced entirely too much movement. 

But, truly, it is the smartphone against which you need to protect yourself the most. I pride myself in how I haven’t slept with the terrible Stone of Terrenon next to my bed pretty much ever in my life. It never enters the bedroom, the sacred space of minimal movement maximal sleep. (Bringing a phone into a bedroom feels like wearing shoes inside a house: gross and very wrong.) And come morning, I keep that cursed thing out of sight, away from my gaze as long as possible. To touch it for even a second is to butter bread at a volume that will burst ear drums. It’s a hundred million teas poured from a thousand miles high. So much movement, and yet it’s so seductive, that movement. 

A big walk across town, looking at the world is very little movement. It is the precise amount of movement needed to be doing the thing. It is a perfect amount of movement. It is human-sized and kind. It’s movement that contains worlds of stillness. Bureaucratic activities are the cursed antipode to a committed walk looking at the world. Bureaucracies are confined and small and hyper-particular about details that exist to crush a soul and deflate a heart. Too much of all the wrong movement. The walk is not that, it is an expansion of the heart through just the right kind of movement, through finding stillness in simple motion. As is spending a great morning working on a book, going deep and really sitting with the thing, the work. A morning of silences and just-so movements leaving you floating off, full of life.

That’s what I’m always aiming for, and what big walks help me achieve — all of just the right movement, day after day. And in feeling that you can believe in it, how great those kinds of days feel. And you try to bring even the smallest sliver of that back to the everyday, wherein you must sometimes call the bank and call the airline, and lose the morning, and feel deflated, and instead of working on the book you write up some nonsense on “movement” because it’s all you have in you for the day. But maybe tomorrow will be a little better. So you focus on that, a morning with the possibility of all the entirely correct movement. A lovely thing to dream about. Goodnight!

Of course, because the members of SPECIAL PROJECTS are amazing, and because The Good Place (TGP) — the members-only social network we run — lives up to its name a hundred times over, Jason Kottke posted over there (in response to my diary email) an essay about how hard creatives work to protect themselves from that kind of death-by-movement.

Allende’s reward for her rigid schedule is unadulterated focus. As the computer scientist Cal Newport has noted, writers were the original remote workers, and anyone who studies the great ones will notice that they tend to go out of their way to designate a specific space and time for their work. Maya Angelou famously rented hotel rooms and stripped the artwork from the walls so as not to be distracted. Victor Hugo locked up his clothes while writing so he wouldn’t be tempted to change and go outside. Marcel Proust lined the bedroom where he worked with cork to dampen outside sound.

From: “The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’”.

It goes on:

The reason such practices are important is that sustained focus is highly unnatural for human beings. Our brains evolved to be extremely distractible, to attend to any novel sights and sounds in our vicinity. Unsurprisingly, research has found that people instantly become more creative when distractions are removed. The science writer Annie Murphy Paul explains in her book, The Extended Mind: “It was only when we found ourselves compelled to concentrate in a sustained way on abstract concepts that we needed to sequester ourselves in order to think. To attend for hours at a time to words, numbers, and other symbolic content is a tall order for our brains.”

Which is essentially what I’ve been fighting for these past twenty-two days of working on the book. Creating a protected space to monotask. It’s worked, to a point. But of course is fallible. And life always creeps in. This is why doing these kinds of things at home can be tough (you’re more “exposed” at home). Hence the trope of writers locking themselves in hotel rooms. Or, even better if you can get in, go to a residency like MacDowell, which is basically an entire ecosystem of people screaming at you: MONOTASK!! MONOTASK WELL YOUNG BUCK!! WE’RE HERE FOR YE!! for a month.

OK, as usual, this is very long, and I haven’t gotten to half the things I thought I’d get to. I’m looking at Mt. Fuji in the distance right now. A little hazy but she’s out there. Still snow capped for another couple months. Then climbing season begins. As for me, I have some more words to write in this new book. And then I have some bags to pack. See you on the other side.

C